Dear Reader,
Before I get into this week's topic, I have some personal news I'm still slightly pinching myself about. I've been selected as a finalist for Trailblazer of the Year at the inaugural Neurodiverse Business Awards 2026. The ceremony is on 18th March in London, hosted by ITV's Nina Hossain, with over 400 nominees across all categories and judges from organisations including Meta, the BBC, Lloyds Banking Group, Microsoft and the NHS.
I'm genuinely thrilled. When I started PegSquared, the idea of there being a dedicated awards ceremony celebrating neurodivergent talent in business felt like a long way off. The fact it exists at all tells you something about where this movement is heading. And being recognised alongside so many brilliant people doing this work? That means a lot.
Right. Enough of me being emotional. Let's talk business cases.
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What's Happening on the Ground?
If you only read the headlines, you could be forgiven for thinking the business case for neuro-inclusion is weakening. DEI rollbacks, legal challenges, political noise. It can look like organisations are quietly stepping back.
From where I'm sitting, in conversations with HR teams, line managers and neurodivergent employees every single week, the reality is more complicated. The case isn't disappearing. It's getting messier, more operational, and much harder to ignore.
The biggest shift I've seen over the last couple of years is the rise in disclosure. More people are coming forward with diagnoses or self-identification, and with that comes a completely understandable increase in adjustment requests. On the ground, this is a new normal many HR teams are dealing with much more frequently. Line managers are receiving more disclosures than ever before and don't feel equipped to respond. HR is being pulled into case-by-case situations, trying to work out whether something is a performance issue or an organisational failure to provide reasonable adjustments. Policies and processes often aren't robust enough, so everything feels ad hoc and reactive.
This is where the business case is shifting. Neuro-inclusion is no longer a slide in a DEI strategy deck. It's turning up in performance conversations, grievances, recruitment complaints and attrition data.
The Cost of Ignoring It?
I recently heard about a candidate who disclosed their suspected dyslexia during the recruitment process. The role they were hired into required them to listen and type at the same time, something they simply cannot do.
Because the disclosure wasn't properly explored or built into the process, the individual is now in training for a job that is fundamentally misaligned with their cognitive profile. The organisation is likely to lose them during training or shortly afterwards. Both sides experience frustration, stress and a sense that the system has failed them.
This is not about one "difficult" person. It's about a process that never stress-tested the core demands of the role against the information it already had. That is a business issue: wasted recruitment spend, lost time, and reputational risk, all of which could have been avoided with a more neuro-inclusive approach to hiring.
The Productivity Question
It is often cited that neuro-inclusion improves productivity. There are studies and case examples out there, but many are small-scale or focused on specific programmes, which can make them feel less robust.
However, there's a very simple, very human productivity logic that we overlook. If someone is struggling to do part of their role because of how their brain works, and you change the environment, expectations or tools so that barrier is removed, they will almost certainly be more productive.
The real work isn't in arguing whether that statement is true. It's in understanding the individual's strengths and then designing the job so those strengths are used, and the friction points are reduced. That's as much about team design and role clarity as it is about "reasonable adjustments."
Organisations love to talk about high-performing teams and "playing to strengths." However, in practice, recruitment often defaults to building a list of attributes for a well-rounded individual, rather than asking: what specific strengths do we actually need in this team right now?
For neurodivergent people, that gap can be brutal. They absolutely have the skills and strengths the team needs. They don't have a psychologically safe space to say, "Here's what I find hard, and here's what would help." They mask, overcompensate, burn out and often leave, taking their strengths, institutional knowledge and potential with them.
So What's Actually Changing in 2026?
The business case for neuro-inclusion in 2026 isn't theoretical any more. It's a set of practical, unavoidable questions:
- Are our adjustment policies and processes robust enough that managers aren't guessing on the fly?
- Do our recruitment and performance systems actually test for, and support, the cognitive demands of the roles we hire into?
- Are we clear on the strengths we need in a team, and do people feel safe enough to tell us what they find hard without fearing it will be used against them?
I sit somewhere in the middle between "tell me the productivity uplift in percentage points" and "trust me, it's just the right thing to do." I love the emerging research, and I quote the stronger studies when they fit. But I also see, every week, that when someone is no longer forced to work in a way that constantly trips them up, their performance, wellbeing and contribution improve.
The question I'm hearing less and less is "Should we do this?" And more often, "How on earth do we keep up with the reality that our workforce is already neurodiverse?"
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And finally, a question for you?
If any of this resonates, whether you're an HR leader trying to get ahead of the disclosure curve, a line manager feeling out of your depth, or a neurodivergent professional navigating all of this from the inside, I'd love to hear from you. What's the biggest challenge you're facing right now? Hit reply and let me know.
And if your organisation needs support building robust, practical neuro-inclusion strategies that go beyond awareness, let's have a conversation.
See you next week.
Tania
P.S. Found this useful? Forward it to someone in your organisation who needs to see it. The more people asking the right questions, the better.
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- Consultancy: Policy writing, process redesign, reviewing neurodiversity materials, data, ERG launches - anything neurodiversity at work related!
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